ere taken as proofs, that, in the nature
of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of
mortals, except that which relates to the physical,--to this earth, as
the only phase of existence,--to the vital body, as the all of the human
being. Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material
organization, as heat is the result of combustion: they exhibited
themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death
supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of
combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but
the mere fancy of an excited imagination.

Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this
materialistic influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and,
more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.
The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not
merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual. Science, with her
strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
direction.

It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the
Encyclopaedian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an
insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it. It does not appear
to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of
Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as
those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the
products of chemical combinations.

Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God
adapts the proofs of that which it is important that man should know to
the intellectual progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same
evidence which sufficed for the foundation of religious faith five
hundred years ago will suffice equally well to-day? Truths are eternal;
laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts there is a
childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
arguments suited to various stages of progress.

Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the
economy of human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present
phase, (that phase being but the preparation for another and a higher,)
may it not be, that, as the world advances, men may gradua